Thomson

It’s a heck of a way to run a pre-election campaign. On the eve of an expected election, politicians usually spend their time playing up good news, downplaying the bad, shaking hands and kissing babies.

Georgina Lightning, a film director who just moved back to Edmonton from California.

Photograph by: Shaughn Butts,Edmonton Journal S

EDMONTON - Georgina Lightning drives a 2004 Mercedes convertible so fresh out of Hollywood it still has California plates.

She poses for a photo, flashes a smile, and her long, black hair lifts in the breeze. But the sacred sage bundle tucked under the windshield, the ceremonial tobacco ties hanging from the rear-view mirror, suggest she doesn’t expect this move back home to Edmonton to be easy.

“I’m treating it like a brand new city,” says the 48-year-old with determination. “I’m putting it out there to the universe to meet new people. I’m going to fall in love with this city because there are awesome things, I just have to discover what they are.”

Lightning is a member of the Samson Cree in Hobbema, and she grew up in Edmonton. But she left in 1990 to study at American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Los Angeles, and has acted in the thriller movie Sawtooth, the TV movie Dreamkeeper, with guest appearances on The West Wing and Walker, Texas Ranger.

She’s a film director, writer and actor who won emerging artist of the year at the White House Projects annual EPIC awards for her 2010 film Older Than America, a feature-length film about residential schools. She toured that film to screenings across North America and picked up 23 awards.

The reactions she got to that troubling story of the pain and abuse passed down through generations convinced her that more must be written about the paths to healing afterward. That’s what she’s back in Edmonton to do, using initial commitments and help in kind from the National Film Board, Alberta Film Commission and Truth and Reconciliation Commission to get started on a $4.5-million trilogy of documentaries looking at native depression and suicide, trauma and the healing strength of traditional ceremony.

In the process, she hopes to help film industry here rebuild from the talent exodus and cuts in the 1990s. As Tribal Alliance Productions, “we have a whole slate of projects to shoot here,” she said.

“My hot chick action flick I was going to make had to be put on hold,” but it’s still in the 10-year plan. “The goal is to create a film community here producing many projects at once as does in Vancouver, films, TV and docs. I dream big and am very determined to make things happen on a big scale.”

As for the hot-chick action flick, “it’s going to have really amazing women and action, but it’s going to be revealing the 720 missing women in Canada,” she said. “It’s still going to be media that matters.”

But coming back to Edmonton means first confronting her own pain.

Her father went to residential school, and the violence and abuse he learned there he repeated toward his wife and children. “It was shut up and don’t speak until spoken to. It was living in constant fear,” she said, recounting how she would lay awake on the sofa in their two-room house and watch her father beat her mother, trying to pretend she wasn’t afraid.

She went school with black eyes and bruises, but at the mostly Caucasian Britannia Junior High School, no one asked her why. Instead, she faced a battery of names such as “wagon-burner, bush Indian and dirty squaw,” and learned to just survive.

“You’re a little girl, but you learn to be really tough,” she said. “I just developed this really dirty mouth.” And if she was picked on by the other kids, “just pick the biggest one and kick the shit out of them and no one else will touch you.”

She had her first child at 17, a baby girl whose father left her after she was raped three months later by a stranger. At 18, she tried to commit suicide, and woke up in the hospital. Later, she had two boys with a man who became physically abusive two weeks after their marriage. He was already cheating on her when she had her second son, and when she signed the birth papers on her own, she knew: “If I can fill that out on my own, I can do anything alone. So I went home and tossed his stuff on the front lawn in garbage bags.”

Her decision to move to Los Angeles came soon after.

She had finished high school at Terra School after the birth of her first child, then went to NAIT for business during that second abusive relationship. By 1989, she enrolled for a bachelor of arts at the University of Alberta, taking all her electives in drama. But she kept criticizing the program until her professor said, “Have you ever thought of going to one of the better schools? There’s a lot of good ones in the U.S.”

So she did. “I crossed the border, changed my life. The second I crossed the border, I reinvented myself and decided it was going to be about happiness and love, prosperity and success and everything beautiful and I would never look back again.”

Lightning found healing through traditional ceremonies. The community in Los Angeles was made up of dozens of First Nations actors all far away from homes scattered across the country. They invited her to tag along on trips back to their reserves, and slowly introduced her to powwow, sweat lodges and sun dances.

The Sundance touched her so much she used images from it in the open sequence for Older Than America. The dancers prepare prayers for a year ahead of time, thinking about them as they tie 405 tobacco bundles. Then they dance, fast and pray under the hot sun for four days.

If the dancers make it to the fourth day, and only a few do, the final act is to pierce themselves, either by piercing their chest with hooks tied to ropes hanging from a sacred tree, or by piercing their back to drag buffalo skulls behind them. They dance until they fall in exhaustion, the hooks breaking the skin as they fall. “That piercing is like a release.”

Lightning’s father eventually committed suicide, as did two of her cousins, one at age 13 and one at 14. Things would have been different if they had been able to take his pain to ceremonies like this, she said.

“My dad hung himself. There was no one there to walk him to a tree to do the Sundance properly. So instead of piercing and hanging the right way with tradition and ceremony behind him, with a pipe, instead, he hung himself from a tree.”

Lightning hopes her trilogy will help her people find a way to heal the pain driving them to alcohol, addictions and other destructive activities, and also help educators and others working with aboriginal people to understand the roots of social problems.

“The whole idea is to promote healing for natives and non-natives. I want to get experts from around the world to demonstrate what happens to a brain when it’s traumatized at a very young age,” she said.

“What people need to know is that we’re stuck in trauma, Indian country is stuck in trauma. With residential schools, we’re only one generation from it. We inherit the effects.

“A lot of people don’t realize they are stuck in trauma. They’ve accepted really dysfunctional lives as normal. Life doesn’t have to be like that.”